10 Marketing Myths That Can Kill Your Book and Career (And Their Remedies!)

Here are excuses many authors use not to promote, killers all. Each includes advice that will help a writer salvage his book and career from wrong thinking.

 "My book is doing well enough. My career is on an upturn. I can easily take a year off from promoting to write." Advice: Cut back if you must but slot in some time to keep the efforts you've already made at least at a simmer.

 "I hear everyone is cutting back on promotion so why shouldn't I?" Advice: Didn't your mother ever ask you, "If Johnny jumped off a cliff, would you do it, too?" Look at those authors. If they're selling lots of books, it's because somebody (their publisher, bookstores, their publicists) is promoting them. I'll bet, though, that most of the authors saying this aren't selling very many. Look at your situation. If you don't do it, who will do it for you?

 "I like Carolyn's Frugal Book Promoter idea so I'm going to only do things that cost no money at all." Advice: Hey! Frugal is one thing. Cheap is another. Some of the best things you can do cost some money. An example is American Booksellers Association Advance Access program. Find it at www.bookweb.org. Careful though. Always weigh the "rightness" of any program for your particular book.

 "I'm gong to examine everything I'm doing and only continue what I can prove is working." Advice: You may not be able to prove much, if anything. That's not the way marketing works. Judge how well your entire campaign is going only after you have given it plenty of time to work. If one thing is working well, maybe it is because your title or name is being seen elsewhere. Balance your campaign, yes. Try new things, yes. Cut back on a few only if you must. Keep in mind that book sales are not necessarily the most valid way to evaluate your promotion.

 "Nothing I've tried works. I'm giving up." Advice. You may be on the brink. Or maybe you've been giving up on each aspect of your campaign too early. Any marketing plan must be many-pronged, frequent and long-term.

 "If I cut back on promotion and find my sales slipping, I can always gear up again." Advice: Yikes! Good publicity and promotion build. It's like skipping rocks on a pond. With each stone, ripples wave out, out, out. Eventually, after you've skipped lots and lots of stones, the results start coming back to you in waves. If you stop whipping those stones into the water, the results dissipate. It will take a long time to get enough stones dancing across the water again to match what you've done and, once you lose momentum, you may never get it back.

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson is the author of The Frugal Book Promoter: How to Do What Your Publisher Won't, The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success and an Amazon Short, "The Great First Impression Book Proposal: Everything You Need To Know To Sell Your Book in 20 Minutes or Less." Learn more at www.howtodoitfrugally.com.

Seven Easy Ways to Keep Dialogue Sharp

This blog post is a bit of a celebration. Apparently this month Sharing with Writers blog was named to Writers Digest 101 Best Resources or something similar. I am being vague because I haven't seen; I've only heard about it from friends who are happy to pass on good news. So, I got to thinking that people might want to know something of the kind of fare they will find on my other blog, The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor at www.thefrugaleditor.blogspot.com. You'll find articles there, questions and answers and lots of discussions on the differences between rules and style choices.

Seven Easy Ways to Keep Dialogue Sharp

By Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Author of The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success

1. Keep it simple. "He said" and "She said" will usually do. Your reader is trained to accept this repetition.

2. Forget you ever heard of strong verbs. Skip the "He yelped" and the "She sighed." They slow your dialogue down. If you feel need them, look at the words—the actual dialogue— your character used when he was yelping. Maybe it doesn't reflect the way someone would sound if he yelped. Maybe if you strengthen the dialogue, you can ditch the overblown tag.

3. When you can, reveal who is saying something by the voice or tone of the dialogue. That way you may be able to skip tags occasionally, especially when you have only two people speaking to one another. Your dialogue will ring truer, too.

4. Avoid having characters use other characters' names. In real life, we don't use people's names in our speech much. We tend to reserve using names for when we're angry or disapproving or we just met in a room full of people and we're practicing out social skills. Having a character direct her speech to one character or another by using her name is a lazy writer's way of directing dialogue and it will annoy the reader. When a reader is annoyed, she will not be immersed in the story you are trying to tell.

5. Avoid putting internal dialogue in italics. Trust your reader. She will know who is thinking the words from the point of view of the narrative.

6. Be cautious about using dialogue to tell something that should be shown. It doesn't help much to transfer telling from the narrator to the dialogue. It just makes the character who is speaking sound long winded. Putting quotation marks around exposition won't draw the reader into the scene or involve him more than if you'd left it part of the narrative.

7. And magic number seven is, don't break up dialogue sequences with long or overly frequent blocks of narrative. One of dialogue's greatest advantages is that it moves a story along. If a writer inserts too much stage direction, it will lose the forward motion and any tension it is building.

For more on writing dialogue check out Tom Chiarella's Writing Dialogue (Writers' Digest) and for more on editing in general—from editing query letters to turning unattractive adverbs into metaphoric gold—find The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success (Red Engine Press) on Amazon.
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Carolyn Howard-Johnson is an instructor for the UCLA Extension Writer's Program. The first book in her HowToDoItFrugally Series of books, The Frugal Book Promoter, won USA Book News' Best Professional Book Award and Book Publicists of Southern California's Irwin Award. The second, The Frugal Editor, is also a USA Book News winner as well as a Reader Views Litary Award winner and the campaign for that book was named Best Marketing by the New Generation Indie Awards committee. It includes many editing tips on dialogue, the use of quotation marks and more. Learn more at www.howtodoitfrugally.com . This article is available for republishing on the Articles4Writers,Editors page.

So What's With All the Online Marketing Talk?

Learning from the Big Boys and Girls and Vice Versa

In my AllMarketing edition of Sharing with Writers* you saw lots of talk about e-books and online marketing. I hope you aren't still giving e-books the squint-eye. I'm pretty sure I've convinced you that online marketing is as important, if not more important (because of its reach and because of its no-cost or low cost)) and if I haven't, all this news from the likes of Borders, HarperCollins,in that issue should have convinced you. These big guys (gals?) should have been the leaders. Instead books like The Frugal Book Promoter (first published in 2004) have been. That's OK. At least we're all getting onto the same page!

So, even if you're not convinced yet that you should publish your book as an e-book if for no other reason than that some people WANT to buy it that way and that one person who passes your book because it's not available on Sony Reader or Kindle or just as a plain old .pdf on your publisher's website, might be a director or producer who would have read your book on a plane, fallen in love with it and decided to offer you a contract. If that doesn't sound good to you, far be it from me to try to convince you -- even those of you who write literary novels or short stories.

Still, here are some other e-adventures you could take with your book.

1 Publish it as a .pdf to be given as a small add-on purchase with that bouquet of roses florists' (or some other commercial) sites at Mothers Day or Valentines. That's what Magdalena Ball and I did with Cherished Pulse, our book of unsyrupy love poetry. Find it now free at www.authorscoalitionandredenginepress.com/free_ebooks.htm.

2. Use a small e-book as a promotion device. Soon to come is my The Ultimate Frugal (FREE) Booklet on Editing: Get Zero-Tolerance Editors to Look at Your Manuscript, a list of common and errors easily overlooked during the editing process. It's sort of an addendum to The Frugal Editor: Put YOur Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success. I haven't decided how to get this booklet to you. Free with purchase? An under $5. retail? A gift-with-purchase using a code when people buy my books at fairs and speaking venues? All of the above? Stephen King tried it a couple of years ago and gave up. He was to far ahead of the curve, I guess.

3. E-publish your book chapter-by-chapter on your site or as a blog. No ch ^ rge or a small charge. To build loyalty and interest in your other books. This is especially a good idea if you have an early novel that hasn't been published and needs some sprucing up.

4. E-publish excerpts from your book on your blog or on your website -- free. One chapter at a time. When you try this idea (I've not tested it), remove the former chapter when you put up the next. I think this might work especially well for a book that has been out there awhile and is losing steam. Or as prepublicity for a book that won't be out for some time. Those who come in late will buy your book to get the early chapters. Those who come in late will visit your site every single time a new chapter is posted and become loyal fans. You know they will!

Read Kathe Goglewski's free e-book that will soon be released at www.tri-studio.com. It's full of Out of the Box promotion deas including some e-ideas. All the ideas in it were winners of her first annual Out of the Box promotion ideas contest.

*Subscribe with the automatic signup window in the left column of this blog or send me an e-mail at HoJoNews@aol.com with "SUBSCRIBE" in the subject line.

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author THIS IS THE PLACE; HARKENING: A COLLECTION OF STORIES REMEMBERED; TRACINGS, a chapbook of poetry; and two how to books, THE FRUGAL BOOK PROMOTER: HOW TO DO WHAT YOUR PUBLISHER WON'T; and THE FRUGAL EDITOR: PUT YOUR BEST BOOK FORWARD TO AVOID HUMILIATION AND ENSURE SUCCESS.
Her other blogs include TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com and AuthorsCoalition.blogspot.com, a blog that helps writers and publishers turn a ho-hum book fair booth into a sizzler.

A Little Nudge on Branding for the Recession

It seems the term "branding" is moving from marketing jargon into the nation's general vocabulary. An article in Time (April 14th issue, 2008) looks at the Pope's "long fascination with America and how it is shaping his vision for the world." It refers to "the democratic, pluralistic values that constitute (on our good days) the American brand."

An article on Pope Benedict seems a rather odd place to be seeing this marketing term, don't you think? The thing is, minds everywhere are turning to branding as we move into recession (whether it is an actual economic guru-sanctioned recession or one that many of us are feeling in the gut and pocketbook is really immaterial).

Speaking of branding and recessions, I might mention that in bad times it is often a product's or business's successful branding that helps carry them across the dangerous economic times to even greater loyalty when better days return. YOU, the author, are what you brand. Your book is only a sub-brand for you may write many books in many different genres -- if not now, then eventually. So, now is not the time to let down your branding efforts. Luckily, we have the Internet now so we can continue to brand ourselves very inexpensively.

This is your nudge to go for it! Don't just read The Frugal Book Promoter. Read lots of book. Add John Kremer's 1001 Ways to Market Your Book to your library. Add one of Peter Bowerman's Well-Fed Writer books to your purchase. The Frugal Editor is also about marketing for editing -- especially the editing of your query letter, is an author's first marketing offense, their introduction to gatekeepers who can make or break their writing careers. and when you're buying these books, do it frugally. Buy second hand or group your purchases on Amazon to avoid shipping costs and taxes. (-:
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Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author THIS IS THE PLACE; HARKENING: A COLLECTION OF STORIES REMEMBERED; TRACINGS, a chapbook of poetry; and two how to books, THE FRUGAL BOOK PROMOTER: HOW TO DO WHAT YOUR PUBLISHER WON'T; and THE FRUGAL EDITOR: PUT YOUR BEST BOOK FORWARD TO AVOID HUMILIATION AND ENSURE SUCCESS.
Her other blogs include TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com and AuthorsCoalition.blogspot.com, a blog that helps writers and publishers turn a ho-hum book fair booth into a sizzler.